General Membership Open Meeting Today

Greetings, Members of the Worcester Mental Health Network:

I am typing this e-mail on a beautiful spring day, thinking how am I going to convince people to come to our General Membership meeting at the Central Massachusetts AHEC on 37 Harvard St., Worcester MA on Wednesday, May 13th at 4 PM.  Our guest will be Jack Simon of the Children’s Behavioral Health Initiative, who will be filling us in on what is going to be going on when the next phase of reform hits in July, with the unrolling of the CSAa and the Wraparound services.  We have a number of questions that we are hoping he will address, most of which are outlined below.  If you have others, leave then on the blog.

• - How is this going to work REALLY?  What are you hearing from different parts of the State?
  
• - How are we going to get all of those people in the room?  Timing and transportation will be very challenging.
  
• - Small caseloads- how do we keep it small? The caseloads planned are higher than what are usually seen in the Wraparound model.
  
• - How is the training going to be done?  
• The clinicians need to be able to work at various levels of service within the system, in order to assure continuity of care.  Staffing and supervision will also be remarkably tricky.  How can this be done within the budgeted resources?
  
• - How can the ICC coordinate with the other teams (IEP, DCF, Court)?
  
• - How does the CANS fit it into all of this?
  

If the strength of our speaker is not sufficient to bring you to the meeting, then I promise that, in addition, there will be cookies.  Hope to see you there.

I'll update this later, to see how our discussion goes.